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SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE STORY GOES, ONCE OBSERVED THAT "the very rich are different from you and me." Which supposedly evoked from Ernest Hemingway the rather contemptuous if unarguable comment: "Yes, they have more money."

The irony, it turns out, is that Fitzgerald, for all his fascination laced with envy for the very rich, proved nearer the mark than Hemingway's more sober and cynical appraisal of the species.

For the very rich are different from ordinary mortals. Nor do you have to go very far or search very hard to find solid evidence of that striking distinction. As Exhibit A, we refer you to a neat front-page piece in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal on the sumptuous posthumous paydays awaiting any number of our captains of commerce and industry.

In particular, we were struck by the contractual obligation of Shaw Group to its CEO, James M. Bernhard. More specifically, we were awed by the provision in his contract that Shaw pay Mr. Bernhard $17 million "not to compete with us for a two-year period following termination of employment."

The kicker there, of course, is that the $17 million for not competing, the Journal reports, will still be due Mr. Bernhard if he is no longer among the living. Which suggests to us that at least some of the very rich have discovered the secret of reincarnation and, for all we know, already have crossed the great divide and returned the very same day in the very same form, ready, if necessary, to compete with their former employer.

But lest some of you get ideas, let us stress that the very rich are a secretive lot and not given to sharing such vital information. In other words, we common folks don't have a ghost of a chance of enjoying such a round trip or landing a noncompete payoff after we're officially declared deceased.

Please, don't get the impression that we lack due appreciation of the extraordinary qualities that enable the very rich to achieve their affluence (like having a very rich father) or that we're eager to foment animosity toward the upper classes. So we feel compelled to also point out that being very rich has its heavy burdens as well as its posthumous privileges.

A graphic illustration of that can be found in the melancholy tale of Samuel Israel III, a hedge-fund manager who was slated to begin serving a 20-year term last week for defrauding his investors of something over $400 million. Instead, Mr. Israel decided to kiss the world goodbye and jump off the Bear Mountain bridge, leaving the keys in his SUV, having written "suicide is painless" on its hood.

So far as we can determine, he chose to take his life even though he had no noncompete clause after death in his contract with his former partners. If an ordinary Joe had jumped off the Bear Mountain Bridge, do you think for a minute anyone would doubt Joe was gone forever?

Yet simply because of the remote possibility that Samuel Israel III might have stashed away a chunk of the $400 million that elevated him to the status of the very rich, instead of a respectful obit he was featured on a wanted poster and described as armed and dangerous.

Scott, wherever you are, you were sure dead right.

WHEN EVERYONE WAS MAKING money hand over fist trading stocks or flipping condos, "speculator" was a term, if not exactly of affection, that at worst signified an amiable fecklessness. But now that day traders have been forced to take night jobs to support their habit and condos aren't worth the paper their foreclosure notices are written on, speculator has taken on a much more sinister cast.

Eminences ranging from the head of OPEC to a gaggle of hedge-fund sages have unequivocally pronounced speculators downright evil, pointing to $130-a-barrel crude, $4-plus gasoline and explosive rises in corn, wheat and the rest of the yum-yums as evidence of the satanic breed's machinations in the commodity-futures markets.

Let us quickly dispense with the obvious disclaimers. Yes, there are speculators in commodities and they love to pile on, so if the markets are especially antsy they can and do make them more so. But speculation in commodities goes back to the Stone Age (not to be confused with the present stoned age), when cave men swapped woolly-mammoth tusks for such edible delicacies as platypus snouts.

It's nothing new, in other words. Which hasn't stopped the host of tut-tuters, including not a few of our chosen representatives with their eyes, as usual, wide shut, from discovering them.

As we've had occasion to say more than once, the idea that runaway commodity prices is all the fault of the big, bad speculators is so much piffle. They may make a splash or even waves, but they don't make a trend. Whatever exacerbation they cause, the principal levitating thrust for commodity prices comes from natural phenomena like drought and flood or human phenomena like great leaps forward in consumption -- sometimes both -- that disturb the often delicate balance between supply and demand.

With this year's election ever more imminent, our stalwart Congress is frantically pressing the search for a scapegoat on which it can hang the blame for sky-high oil prices and pacify voters driven mad by pump rage every time they fill 'er up. Big oil is also a big campaign contributor, so the smarmy solons have targeted those dastardly anonymous speculators.

Marveling at the extraordinary number of committees and subcommittees Congress has been whistling up to probe commodity bubbles, Barclays Capital's estimable analysts, in their recent weekly oil review, conjecture that at the present sizzling pace of committee creation, by year's end, two out of three Americans will have given testimony on commodity bubbles. Helpful to a fault, the Barclays chaps offer some tips to the brave souls impelled to plow through the daunting and still mounting reams of such testimony.

One is to stop reading pronto any transcript that contains the phrase "I am an expert." That's the surest sign, they explain, of the reverse. The only thing more off-putting in a text than "I am an expert," they contend, is the insistence "I am not an expert," a demur they find as reassuring as the declaration "I am not an expert, but I have come up with a radical new design for a passenger plane."

As a prominent and recent example of the fatal phrase "I am not an expert" in the torrent of testimony, they cite George Soros, whose remarks to an all-ears Senate committee began: "I am not an expert on oil markets..." and immediately went on to claim expertise on bubbles. Which, the Barclays folks may have been too polite to note, in one fell sentence raised both red flags -- the one bearing the legend "I am not an expert," the other, "I am an expert." If it's any consolation to George, we doubt we'd have gotten around to reading his testimony anyway.

The Barclays bunch believes that given the amount of hysteria and misinformation being generated at the congressional bubble hearings, any legislative actions that ultimately result are apt to prove more disruptive than remedial. Such legislation seems destined to be rich in potential to create short-term turbulence and exaggerate longer-term price inflation by discouraging investment that might enhance supply and delay the necessary hard decisions that could moderate demand.

Moreover, Barclays Capital feels that the role of institutional influence in commodity markets via investment in index funds has been vastly overrated. It reckons the rise in commodity funds under management in the first quarter at $13 billion, of which $11 billion represented the effect of higher prices and only $2 billion represented net inflows.

In fact, speculation in oil, the analysts report, has been "flat-lining within some broad swings for just over a year" and speculative money is moving toward the short side. On that score, the latest count of crude futures shows 216.4 million barrels in long positions, 188.1 million barrels in short positions.

Sad to relate, a glance at Barclays Capital's price forecasts suggests triple-digit-crude as far as the eye can see. If it makes you feel better, they're not talking $200 a barrel. But then, the Brits are notorious for their preference for understatement.

THE STOCK MARKET REFUSES to go down for the count.

And that's the bad news. For it suggests that investors are still possessed by the notion that the big risk is missing the next move up rather than avoiding another bad pummeling.

As a result, they greet almost every piece of equivocal news as bullish and, until it whacks them in the side of their head, tend to ignore the bearish stuff. Like fresh daily evidence that the credit crisis still is with us and still fraught with pain.

The dubious combination of the transient stimulus of the tax rebates and inflation that's helping to kite, however selectively, retail-sales volume has for the moment revived investor spirits. At the same time, the consumer is plainly hurting from the tightening squeeze of skimpy income and stingy hiring, on the one hand, and on the other, the remorseless inflation that's daily causing him (and her) so much angst.

The longer investors refuse to face up to the bitter truth about the economy, the credit mess, the shambles that is housing, contracting corporate profits and the shaky underpinning of the market, the worse the shock when the day of reckoning comes.